Ryanair considers East Midlands summer expansion

Ryanair is considering expanding its presence at Nottingham East Midland Airport in summer 2012 (Leicester Mercury, 18-Aug-2011). The LCC announced it had carried its 10 millionth passenger from East Midlands since launching services at the airport in 2004. Ryanair operates to 33 destinations from East Midlands, but the network will be reduced to 18 destinations for the winter schedule.

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Kenny Jacobs, Ryanair's Chief Marketing Officer, has said that its website aims to become the "Amazon of air travel". The airline that was built around selling seats on flights as cheaply as possible – and not much else – now wants to sell a much wider range of products and services. In Oct-2016 it launched its new accommodation service, Ryanair Rooms, and it plans Ryanair Holidays by next summer.

Now well into its third year, Ryanair's 'Always Getting Better' programme (abbreviated to 'AGB') has been a demonstrable success. Accompanied by a move to increase Ryanair's presence in primary airports, AGB has aimed to improve customer service and reinvigorate its digital interfaces. Since AGB was initiated in 2014 Ryanair's passenger numbers have returned to double-digit rates of growth, and load factor has gained more than 10ppts.

CAPA's first two parts of this analysis of Romanian aviation and the country's leading airlines highlighted the rapid, LCC-fuelled growth in the market of the past two years. The home-grown LCC Blue Air has overtaken the national airline TAROM in passenger numbers and fleet size, although Wizz Air is the largest airline in the market and Ryanair is also growing fast in the country. This third part of the analysis considers respective route networks and the competitive positions of TAROM and Blue Air.

Blue Air announced in Oct-2016 that it will establish a base in Liverpool in 2017, with new routes from the UK city to a range of European destinations outside Romania. This is a sign that Blue Air is taking the fight to airlines such as Ryanair and easyJet as it embraces the pan-European LCC model. Blue Air CEO Gheorghe Racaru has said, "The UK is a strategic market for Blue Air and we strongly believe that basing a 737-800 at Liverpool will allow us to strengthen our position as one of Europe’s fastest growing airlines".

For its part, TAROM, loss-making in contrast with Blue Air's profitability, is embarking on a restructuring following a change of management. It is facing increased competition on its network, while Blue Air has targeted its growth on routes where competitors are scarce or non-existent.